Once again, all this depends on the largesse of the spouse.  The wage earner could, if he wants, set aside money for a full IRA for the non-working spouse. He doesn't have to if he doesn't want to.  If he would rather spend the money on beer for his buddies, or put the money towards a full size pickup he can do that.  Without social security there wouldn't be any legal financial protections for the stay at home wife and mother.

But it is better than nothing, which is what the stay at homes would be left with.


So how do you enforce it?  What happens if you give po folk more money so they can save for retirement, except they bilk the system and spend it on HDTVs?  Not that it will always happen, but y'know...

Financial security is partly due to income and partly due to behavior.  I think government can play a part in the income portion, but how do you legislate behavior? 

So how do you enforce it?  What happens if you give po folk more money so they can save for retirement, except they bilk the system and spend it on HDTVs?  Not that it will always happen, but y'know...

Financial security is partly due to income and partly due to behavior.  I think government can play a part in the income portion, but how do you legislate behavior? 


FOCUS


It is not about "po folk".  I am trying to get people here to focus on the stay at home mom, the one that remains married,  that many would have us believe is exalted in our society, but isn't.  She is not relegated to the lower incomes, as a matter of fact she is generally in the solid working class. She is held up as the exemplar, but if we were to end social security, and the principal wage earner, who is not required in any way to make provisions for his spouse during the marriage or in the event of his death, he is not even required to let her know how much money he earns, were to leave her destitute, would we then say, "hey you did the right thing, raised the children, did the volunteer work, everything society holds dear,  now you need us, but hey, tough luck,  you never really worked because you never earned wages.  Lots of luck."  ?

Maybe it's insulting, but it's also accurate.

By the way... Foo Bar...  you should run for office.  :)


No, it is not accurate.  I do a lot of reading on human origins and human evolution, and the majority of paleoanthropologists reject the comparisons.  We have very little in common with ape society according to most of those scientists.

No, it is not accurate.  I do a lot of reading on human origins and human evolution, and the majority of paleoanthropologists reject the comparisons.  We have very little in common with ape society according to most of those scientists.


The monkeysphere still seems pretty accurate though.

FOCUS


It is not about "po folk".  I am trying to get people here to focus on the stay at home mom, the one that remains married,  that many would have us believe is exalted in our society, but isn't.  She is not relegated to the lower incomes, as a matter of fact she is generally in the solid working class. She is held up as the exemplar, but if we were to end social security, and the principal wage earner, who is not required in any way to make provisions for his spouse during the marriage or in the event of his death, he is not even required to let her know how much money he earns, were to leave her destitute, would we then say, "hey you did the right thing, raised the children, did the volunteer work, everything society holds dear,  now you need us, but hey, tough luck,  you never really worked because you never earned wages.  Lots of luck."  ?


I think my point is relevant though.  The government can regulate a minimum wage, and can provide tax-shelters and other retirement packages for families, but it is up to the individual family to take advantage of it.  America is the land of opportunity, and if they choose not to take advantage of that opportunity and instead blow a mortgage payment on an HDTV, how do you propose that we pass a law to fine them or whatever, aside from telling them that they suck for being financially irresponsible?  Besides, when one gets married, how they choose to conduct their marriage, including finances, is their business.  I'm all in favor of helping people save for retirement, but if they don't want to help themselves, what am I supposed to do about it? 

I think my point is relevant though.  The government can regulate a minimum wage, and can provide tax-shelters and other retirement packages for families, but it is up to the individual family to take advantage of it.  America is the land of opportunity, and if they choose not to take advantage of that opportunity and instead blow a mortgage payment on an HDTV, how do you propose that we pass a law to fine them or whatever, aside from telling them that they suck for being financially irresponsible?  Besides, when one gets married, how they choose to conduct their marriage, including finances, is their business.  I'm all in favor of helping people save for retirement, but if they don't want to help themselves, what am I supposed to do about it? 


I understand your point.  You seem to dwell on the people that I am not talking about.  It is easy to point to that portion who throw out their money, people with the education and ability who should know better.  But I see so many people without the education, without the wherewithal, people much more naive and trusting.  People who don't buy the HDTVs, people who work hard, do all the right things, then one day find themselves on the very short end of the stick, reduced to begging in the richest country in the world.  I firmly believe that we should be judged by our treatment of the most vulnerable.

I understand your point.  You seem to dwell on the people that I am not talking about.  It is easy to point to that portion who throw out their money, people with the education and ability who should know better.  But I see so many people without the education, without the wherewithal, people much more naive and trusting.  People who don't buy the HDTVs, people who work hard, do all the right things, then one day find themselves on the very short end of the stick, reduced to begging in the richest country in the world.  I firmly believe that we should be judged by our treatment of the most vulnerable.


It's that Ronald Reagan mental block still hindering conservative thought after all these years:  If your indigent it's because you're a spendthrift who doesn't know how to manage money.

(Which was kind of a funny attitude for Reagan to have.)

actually the monkeysphere is an interesting idea. there seems to be a certain desire toward regression in it, do we really want to regress to a tribal state in which we only concern ourselves with what we can know with the minds we had when we were all huddled around campfires 10,000 years ago? if so, why do you think we organized ourselves into nation-states in the first place?


We organized ourselves into larger groups so that we could take advantage of specialization of labor to create food surpluses. 

I'm not arguing that we devolve into neolithic-sized groups of 150 people.  The Stone Age sucked because each band was separate from each other, and had to most of its time foraging for food.  They actually had more leisure time than we do today, but they had miserable life expectancies and no way to use food surpluses to fund specialization of labor, which meant that band-sized groups could never invent medicine, rocketships, or video games.  Screw that :)

You're going to want to read Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse for a better explanation of how it works, and the ways in which it can stop working.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Button,_Button_(The_Twilight_Zone)


Karma for "Button, Button".  It's the perfect Monkeysphere illustration.  "Someone I don't know" means protects 150/6,000,000,000 people.  But "someone one-link-removed from my monkeysphere" could be as many as 22,500 people.  I'd be saddened if my best friend's friend (even if I've never heard of the person) got buttoned.  I'd be at least "miffed" if my friend told me that his friend's wife got buttoned.  Within two-degrees-of-separation in 150-person groups, you're probably talking about more than 3 million people.  Even subtracting a huge amount for overlaps, you're probably talking about hundreds of thousands of people.

It's a "six-degrees-of-separation" thought experiment on a societal scale.  Our individual monkeyspheres, if connected, would - by definition, since no man is an island - cover all 6 billion of us.  We just don't know it yet, because the tools to visualize it and turn it into viable social policy haven't been made clear. 

What if there was a "Button, Button" that dropped $100 into the wallet of "someone you don't know, but a friend of a friend, or a friend of a friend of a friend" at random?  What if everyone had such a button?  How often would you press yours? 

If 1/3 of tax revenues are currently used to fund entitlements, would you continue with the current system, or would you press the button once for every $300 withheld from your taxes (in exchange for a corresponding tax reduction!)?  Right now, the current system guarantees that only pennies of your taxes go to anyone you (or anyone you know) cares about.  If you knew that it would going to someone a few links closer to you "complete stranger", might you even press it more often than once for every $300 in taxes currently withheld?


Maybe it's insulting, but it's also accurate.

By the way... Foo Bar...  you should run for office.  :)


Are you nuts?  I can barely take care of myself and the closest 5-10 in my monkeysphere, let alone all 299,999,999 of the rest of y'all.  And you saw how badly the Chimp did when we put him in charge...

(The real problem with government - be it democracy or autarchy - is that the types of people who seek out government power are precisely the types of people least suited to wield it.  If made Emperor, I'd revert to the Greek system, whereby representatives were selected at random from the population.  A Congress of 535 randomly-selected idiots would probably do no worse than one of 535 corrupt lawyers, most of whom happen to be idiots anyways.)

Back to the monkeysphere idea - how about a Congress of 53500 idiots?  535,000?  At some point, you get the problems of direct democracy.  At present, we suffer from the fact that one Senate or Congressional vote is so important as to be worth buying.  Somewhere in the middle - and it might be too hard to figure out where that optimal point lies - there might be a net benefit.

Another way to take advantage of the monkeysphere would be to keep the numbers as they stand, but to geographically disperse our representatives.  Have the existing 435+100 vote, electronically, from within their own districts.  Right now, the lobbyists congregate on "K Street", and their targets congregate in the Capitol.  Since everyone in this cozy arrangement attends the same circuit of rubber-chicken fundraising dinners, each lobbyist ends up with a few dozen Congresscritters in his Monkeysphere, and each Rep or Senator probably has a similar number of "trusted" lobbyists in his Monkeysphere.  In a distributed government, each lobbyist would have to travel from district to district -- they'd have fewer Congresscritters in their Monkeyspheres.  Conversely, your Congresscritter would have more opportunity tobe forced to interact with his/her actual constituents, and would - even if by accident rather than by choice - have more citizens (and fewer lobbyists) in his/her Monkeysphere.  As a HomeSec bonus, by geographically distributing representative government and doing it all via electronic conferencing, we could ensure continuity of government from anything short of WW3.

I've got a simpler idea....  break America into about 8 pieces.  That would solve a lot of problems right there.

I've got a simpler idea....  break America into about 8 pieces.  That would solve a lot of problems right there.

It feels like they already did...right over my head!

http://www.inthe00s.com/smile/15/tard.gif

It feels like they already did...right over my head!

http://www.inthe00s.com/smile/15/tard.gif


Touche...  lol

Karma for "Button, Button". 

...

What if there was a "Button, Button" that dropped $100 into the wallet of "someone you don't know, but a friend of a friend, or a friend of a friend of a friend" at random?  What if everyone had such a button?  How often would you press yours? 

dude!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Box_(2009_film)

richard kelly's doing a movie adaptation. that's gonna be some wack siht, dawg.

You're going to want to read Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse for a better explanation of how it works, and the ways in which it can stop working.



I agree with Jared Diamond on the big picture.

The activists call me a pessimist.  They're into sustainable organic community agriculture---and I'm not.  I don't knock them for their activism or their ideology.  Actually, I do resent a bit of it, the part that says if everybody was like us, the world would be a utopia.  That part is dangerous if they get in charge.  However, they're not in charge, they're just doing their thing.  Fine.  I agree with the activists that we need to live at sustainable levels of population and resource consumption but I don't see the activists ultimately leading the way.  I see famine, disease, and war as the catalyst.

No, silly, I'm not promoting catastrophe as policy.  This is what you might call beyond good and evil. 

I'm certainly not the first to observe the human will to power through population growth and economic expansion.  I'm often bitter about the second part because I feel like I don't get share in the spoils.  Nonetheless, the activists want those who wield power to voluntarily downsize.  They say we need to enact a negative economic growth rate for our own survival.  Maybe so, but civilizations tend to push it to the limits and if they don't get conquered by a more powerful civilization, they collapse under their own weight.  That's what really happened to the Romans.  They conquered too many nations and expended too many resources, economic and natural, which allowed hordes of lesser powers to destroy the Roman Empire by attrition.  It took hundreds of years--hundreds more than the American empire will ever see--but by the 7th century, their remnants in the East existed in name only. 

Of course, in the past half millennium, we've increased world population by five billion, three in the past century in alone; we've inhabited every corner of the Earth so there's no place left to go, and we've built weapons that can kill us to the last soul, so our fall might not leave our species the same options as the fall of Rome!
:o

As to what is "moral," that's a different kettle o' fish!